Her Brothers were the craggy hills, Her Sisters larchen trees-- Alone with her great family She liv'd as she did please.
No breakfast had she many a morn, No dinner many a noon, And 'stead of supper she would stare Full hard against the Moon.
But every morn of woodbine fresh She made her garlanding, And every night the dark glen Yew She wove, and she would sing.
And with her fingers old and brown She plaited Mats o' Rushes, And gave them to the Cottagers She met among the Bushes.
Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen And tall as Amazon: An old red blanket cloak she wore; A chip hat had she on. God rest her aged bones somewhere-- She died full long agone!
Keats had in this 'trifle,' using the ballad form for the first time, handled it with faultless tact, and though leaving out the tragic features of Scott's creation, had been able to evoke of his own an instantaneous vision of her in vitally conceived spiritual relation with her surroundings.[3] He copied the piece out in letters written in pauses of their walk both to his young sister and to his brother Tom. The letter to Fanny Keats is full of fun and nonsense, with a touch or two which shows that he was fully sensitive to the charm of the Galloway coast scenery. 'Since I scribbled the Meg Merrilies song we have walked through a beautiful country to Kirkcudbright--at which place I will write you a song about myself.' Then follows the set of gay doggrel stanzas telling of various escapades of himself as a child and since,--'There was a naughty boy;' and then the excuse for them,--'My dear Fanny, I am ashamed of writing you such stuff, nor would I if it were not for being tired after my day's walking, and ready to tumble into bed so fatigued that when I am in bed you might sew my nose to my great toe and trundle me round the town, like a Hoop, without waking me.' It was his way on his tour, and indeed always, thus to keep by him the letters he was writing and add scraps to them as the fancy took him. The systematic Brown, on the other hand, wrote regularly and uniformly in the evenings. 'He affronts my indolence and luxury,' says Keats, 'by pulling out of his knapsack, first his paper; secondly his pens; and last, his ink. Now I would not care, if he would change a little. I say now, why not take out his pens first sometimes? But I might as well tell a hen to hold up her head before she drinks, instead of afterwards.'